


there are days we live as if death were nowhere (in the background)

by fluffernutter8



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Angst With Hope, F/M, Future Fic, Kid Fic, Mentions of Cancer, Not Comic Canon Compliant, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:34:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27157354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: For some reason, even after all the painful lessons life has taught her, she hadn’t thought to worry whether Angel would be watching beside her.Years on, in the midst of their ordinary life, Buffy and Angel must take on a grave new challenge.
Relationships: Angel/Buffy Summers
Comments: 20
Kudos: 32
Collections: I Will Remember You





	there are days we live as if death were nowhere (in the background)

They’re getting everyone ready for school picture day when the call comes. Buffy has Finn leaning over the kitchen sink, scrubbing at him with a paper towel soaked in rubbing alcohol as she tries to remember what other outfits that scream “memorializing my sixth grade year” he might have clean. He’s mostly gone limp and sulkily quiet by this point, having accepted that spraying on a truly eye-watering amount of his father’s cologne was a recipe for ridicule from his classmates rather than a way to lend him some air of maturity magically transmittable via photograph.

(She has no idea how her mother managed all this whole parenting stuff thirty years ago. Joyce had always seemed to know how to solve Buffy’s elementary school problems, even though she’d never been able to subtly Google “remove overpowering cologne stink??” on her phone in order to pretend some kind of omniscient motherly capability.)

Angel stands behind Ro, who is perched on one of the kitchen stools. He’s something of a braiding expert by this point, easily able to hold a conversation as he twists and styles her long hair, but he mostly stands listening, interjecting only soft, periodic affirmations or the occasional question regarding her earnest discussion of the plan she thought up while falling asleep for ensuring that Claudia, the class lizard...thing, isn’t lonely.

Daisy, the cotton-candy cloud of her blonde hair already pulled back in barrettes, reclines against Angel’s left leg as if it is the trunk of her favorite spreading tree in the front yard, the one Angel says is a magnolia. A picture book sits propped on her knees. “This is my favorite part!” she says, pointing at something on the page which Buffy will bet is pink, sparkly, and/or princess shaped. Angel glances down, smiling. “Good choice, Daisy May,” he says while Ro is taking a breath, and Buffy smiles too even as Finn lets out a huff.

The phone rings.

There are other reasons someone might be calling, but some intuition - parent, Slayer, professional at bad news - tells her what it is.

She and Angel had allowed themselves to grow comfortable, or at least to pretend comfort in the days since the appointment. They’d told themselves that surely considering the sensitivity of the tests they would be processed quickly, that the delay meant that everything was fine, that their names had slipped to the bottom of the doctor’s list in favor of families who needed to be contacted immediately for comfort and support and hasty treatment

Except now they might be one of those families, and time has been wasted.

“Go change your clothes and we’ll see how it is afterward,” she tells Finn automatically, and he takes off upstairs as she reaches for the handset on the counter charger. Ro, perhaps more attuned to her parents’ tension and traded glances than her brother, tips her head back and asks Angel, “Is there something wrong at Mommy’s work?”

Buffy’s job is mostly administrative these days: the routine management of the Academy, mentoring the kids there, staying up to date on the latest from their slayers in the field and making sure the information continues to flow unimpeded. But though her children don’t know the precise details of it all, they watched Aunt Willow raise a sharp hand just as Finn gently lowered to the ground after he catapulted over the handlebars of his bike. They’ve been left with a babysitter, usually with something sharp in one pocket or another, while their parents go on business trips they don’t describe but swear are very important. The warnings that they get about not going out at night, being careful around strangers, trusting their instincts, are given with a particular, somber vehemence. The kids might not worry about Buffy every time she leaves the house, but they know that there are some times that those instincts tell them to worry.

“It’s not work stuff, RoRo,” Buffy says, her smile a magic trick. Ro relaxes. Angel’s hands, careful and so loving, trembling just slightly, move to finish off his work. Buffy takes in a breath and says, “Hello.”

* * *

Their search for baby names had started with a long list of people who deserved to be remembered, and a list of those of whom they absolutely did not want to be reminded. (The two were, distressingly, nearly the same length.) They’d balled both up soon after, hemmed by the weight of them.

And that’s when they’d had to face the fact that their tastes in this area were wildly incompatible.

She made fun of him for only liking names on the approved list for English royalty, which got him worked up enough to order a host of new books with titles like _Celtic Baby Names_ and _Beyond Shannon and Sean_ , and leave them lying around filled with the little neon sticky flags from Buffy’s desk. He’d responded to her favorite suggestions by reminding her that unique one year is odd the next, and with parents named Buffy and Angel, there were already enough odd names in their family to go around.

The kids had each come home from the hospital with a name despite everything: Finn after the fabled hero whose tales Angel still spins when everyone is tucked up in their covers. Aurora for the Northern Lights - their first trip together had been to see them, because in all the time he had been alive, Angel had somehow never been in the right place at the right time and they wanted to have something new for the both of them. Daisy, who was meant to be Brynn until Buffy looked down at the newborn in her arms who was trying to keep blinking her bright eyes open, and said, “I think her name is Daisy,” and Angel agreed.

(Well, he did try one last time to bring her around to Ginny, which almost worked until Buffy remembered that it would be short for Virginia and put her foot down as the only one of the two of them who ever had to eat lunch in a high school cafeteria. She has the feeling Daisy will thank her someday.)

All those lists, all that time and thought, to give their children this first gift, this fundamental thing. And there is only more to consider these days, grades and afterschool activities, paying for summer camp, getting Finn to socialize less and Ro to come out of her shell more, having dinner on the table every night with vegetables snuck in when necessary (even as the kids seem to get better at spotting them by the day). Buffy would give everything for them to carry the names they argued over for the next hundred years, to be able to watch them grow and become for however long she’s able.

But for some reason, even after all the painful lessons life has taught her, she hadn’t thought to worry whether Angel would be watching beside her.

* * *

She wakes from a pale sleep curled beside Daisy in her twin bed, Buffy’s back shoved up against the mesh of the bed rail. When she stumbles into her own room, she’s not surprised to see that the bed is empty. Angel had said that he was going for a drive after dinner and he would have woken her up if he had come back in; it isn’t exactly unusual for her to fall asleep while putting the kids to bed. She peers out the window, finds his car returned once again to the driveway, and knows where he must be.

She wraps her sweater more tightly around herself before stepping out into the backyard. Angel sits atop the cedar table that’s set in the grass, his feet resting on the matching bench. It’s where they have barbecues or dinner when the weather is good. Somehow she had imagined him hunched over, shoulders bent with that old and recognizable weight, but he has his head tipped back instead, searching out the moon through the pines and oaks and maples which range tall over the house.

He looks beautiful in its light, the way he always has; it’s different now that she’s so familiar with the way he looks in the sun.

Still in her own embrace, she starts toward where Angel sits. He’d built both bench and table out of creamy red cedar himself.

“I spent two and a half centuries knowing the exact amount of strength I needed to use for everything, and now it’s all different,” he’d told her, sitting in the crumpled green grass as they ate food truck tacos for lunch. He’d been human just over six months, and it was still strange and wonderful to watch him try to grapple with tomatoes and meat and corn, to see him make a face at the guac because he loved the flavor but the texture freaked him out. “I need to know how to use my hands again.”

She deserved at least a firm pat on the back for smiling supportively and taking a sip of her iced tea instead of telling him that in her experience he knew how to use his hands perfectly well. She deserved more for smiling supportively through the first few months of his woodworking attempts, most of which were immediately added to her collection of stakes. But now he has held their just-born babies, sends Ro to school with hair he braided himself, does not have a single moment of doubt about what his hands can do, and she knows it was worth it.

(The table did take a while to materialize. His first big, successful project was making her a chest so she had somewhere to store all her newly acquired pointy friends.)

Angel doesn’t seem surprised to find her approaching him across the grass, accepts it easily as she climbs up to sit between his legs, tucking herself into the curve of his shadow. When the breeze heightens, he closes his arms around her too. She leans back into the comfort of his sweater; it’s odd to see him still dressed this late. He goes to bed practically just after the kids, or at least before the late night shows - she teases him about being an old man - and after so long of being exactly room temperature he gets hot easily under the blankets, sleeps in as little as practical considering potential emergencies and the potential of little “I just had a nightmare” taps on the door. Probably the last time they had been up and about at this time of night was the situation in Peru and that was almost a year ago.

“You went to see Connor?” she asks after a long time of silence.

“Yeah,” he says. His voice is nearly the wind.

Connor lives not quite two hours from them. He actually visits fairly frequently - he loves his half siblings, which Buffy’s pretty sure he’s still shocked by every time he realizes it. There’s still weirdness between him and Angel, but it means something that he chose to move even this close, that he lets Angel introduce him to the other parents at soccer games and gymnastics meets and school plays as, “My oldest, Connor.”

“How did he take it?”

After a minute, Angel says, “He was quiet. Mostly just quiet.”

She turns her head into the warmth of his shoulder, presses her lips there. “No idea where he gets that,” she jokes softly. It is unbelievable that she once thought all of Angel’s silences the same. Now she recognizes their unspoken shades. She hopes Angel knows Connor’s quiet well enough.

“Just before I left, he said he didn’t think it was fair,” Angel tells her, and it is almost as if he is telling himself the story; there is so much marvel in his voice. “He said that after everything, with all that the Powers had thrown at me and finally making me think I had earned a way out, to throw this at me too...he said it wasn’t fair.” His swallows, presses the words out. “He hugged me.”

During apocalypse times past, she and Connor have...well, butted heads, locked horns, pick your own skull-based metaphor, but she doesn’t hesitate to agree when he’s actually got it right. “It’s true. It isn’t fair.” She breathes in deeply, filling herself with the smell of yellowing leaves and the slightest nip of cold, the turn onward still so noticeable to her SoCal self. She tries to think of pushing the kids on the swings, watching Angel attempting to roast his first marshmallow, the deer she sometimes sees back here in the early mornings: other, better memories, which will give her voice strength.

“If the Powers weren’t satisfied with our service, they could have filled out a comment card. Sending a cancer diagnosis is pretty overkill, and that’s coming from an expert in both over and kill,” she says, and despite everything, her voice shakes, though she does not cry.

She tries to shore it up, knows that seeing her hurt will only hurt Angel worse, but her mind turns on her. The thoughts which she had pushed away earlier pulse through her, a drowning rush: sitting through every driving lesson and graduation and meeting with the bank alone, watching their kids on the dance floor at their weddings and having no one to hold her, trying to host Thanksgiving and Christmas and birthdays by herself. She understands Daisy and Finn but Ro confounds her, is so much more like Angel with those quiet, knowing eyes. She doesn’t know how to make tea the right way to help her after a bad day, doesn’t know how to stand never seeing the places they had promised they would together, doesn’t want to someday have to bury one of her slayers, have to bury Giles, without him there to hold her hand. She can’t stand the idea of waiting beside Angel as she loses him again, again, or even worse, having him slip away without her there. The terror of it all fills her lungs, drills through her marrow, leaves her shaking when she means to be strong for him.

“Promise you’ll fight,” she gasps out, best intentions deserting her and leaving only this desperation. “This is another test, another sucky, stupid burden that’s been put on you, on us, but you have to promise that you won’t ever think that it’s some kind of sign that you should give up. Swear to me, Angel.”

She does not say, _Don’t leave me alone_ , but she can tell in his silence that he hears it anyway, and she is selfish for it, and glad.

“In some ways this is exactly what I asked for, the chance for awful, human things to happen to me,” he starts, careful.

“Angel—” she tries, but he continues.

“I have a life,” he promises. “One that they gave to me, one I earned myself. I’ll fight for that, for the chance of every minute more of it. I’ll fight for you, and for them.”

She ties her fingers with his. “Fight for yourself too,” she commands gently. “For as long as you have it in you,” and she can feel in his hands, in his arms and breath and heat around her, in the fearful grasp of him, the promise that he’ll try.

* * *

The light, sliding through the gap in the curtains, wakes her early the next morning. She can tell just from the weight of the silence that the kids are still asleep. Angel lies next to her; she counts her own heartbeats to the rise and fall of his chest.

 _Mine_ , she thinks, fierce and tender.

The hand of dawn strokes over his face. She is forever glad she knows it so well in the light now, so glad that they made it to this time, to this life, where Angel will cook everyone his Saturday morning eggs and Daisy will pour maple syrup on top and say something adorable, and Ro will look wise, and Finn will act like a teenager before any of them are ready for it, and she and her husband will trade a glance from either end of the table, the understanding of the sweetness complete and perfect between just the two of them. They will have many years more of it all; she refuses to allow otherwise.

 _Just try to take him_ , she says to Death, showing her teeth. _Just try._ And she lies there beneath the growing sun, and waits for Angel to wake up into this next of their days together.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Li-Young Lee poem “From Blossoms,” which I heard Rachel McElroy read on an episode of Wonderful in 2018 and knew that I would use as a fic title one day. Just been waiting for the right moment since then.
> 
> Thanks, as always, to our organizer Angelus2Hot.


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